Erica's Stitches

Otherwise known and Mint: 0 and Wild Rose: 4 The saga continues... I've been fighting an ongoing battle in a large planter with a wild rose.  Finally it got too big and last year I ripped it out .  I had to remove all the soil from the planter to get all the roots. In it's place I planted a spearmint plant which totally took over crowding everything else out.  Well almost. This year there is no sign of the mint and there are 4 wild roses coming in. For now, I'll let them be. The chives are still going strong and I planted some oregano. There's room for a few more herbs (basil and something else).  My mini rabbit is still hiding in the chives.  It will be interesting to see what develops in the planter this summer.

My hand is better, but not good enough for stitching.  So, there's been no thoughts of a quiet half hour of stitching to help me get through the day.  Instead I've been spending more time tending the garden. This dwarf papyrus is totally unsuitable to a dry climate but is happy in a container of annuals.  The grape vines are full of grapes.  Last year we got 5 grapes, now have too many to count. More annuals. I'm trying mint again, in a contiainer.  Despite it's reputation for taking over, I always end up killing it.  So far it's doing a good job of taking over.  But, as it turns out, there's competion. Despite my best efforts, the wild rose is back .  If they both survive the winter there will be an epic battle for contol of the barrel.  I can't believe this is the same barrel I wrote about last spring.  All the plants have grown like crazy.  Even the chives are holding their own against the mint.  

Almost exactly a year ago I wrote about wild roses and chives . The wild rose in my container garden had turned into a weed, taking over the whole thing.  This year I decided to tackle the problem before it got any bigger.  The wild rose didn't go kicking and screaming but it did inflict wounds with its mini thorns.  The roots went deep into the bottom of the barrel. I added some new compost to the barrel, some of the old chives and new violas.  That's all I dare plant now as frosts are still likely.  Later I'll add some herbs or flower seeds and make the garden look more like a garden. And I still have more chives to plant and give away.  Alas, the rose did not survive the operation.

Look who I found crawling on the parsley. When I first found them they all looked like the upper 2 caterpillars.  I decided to try to identify them to see if they were good caterpillars or bad caterpillars. My well-used butterfly book that I received in 1972 didn't show any caterpillars resembling mine so I switched to the Internet.  All the caterpillars that came up with parsley didn't look anything like it.  So, I focused on the white stripe.  Everything that came up had stripes going from head to toe, not across.  Next, I tried white band and that did it.  The same caterpillar associated with parsley came up.  After I clicked into enough sites I discovered that the caterpillar starts out looking one way and then changes.  The photo above was taken 24 hours after I first found the caterpillars and you an see that the lower one has changed but the remnants of the stripe is still visible. The caterpillars will become black swallowta...

Wild Roses and Chives - now that's a strange combination.  But, it's my fault for not taking care of the problem earler. This is my herb garden but the only herb in it right now is chives.  I've kept this plant alive for over 10 years now.  Every spring they come back without fail.  The light green you see in the planter is lots of baby chives coming up.  All spring and summer I'll be snipping off the chives for seasoning.  Anything else I plant makes it for a year or so and doesn't come back.  There's a lavender and thyme in there right now that may or may not be dead.  I'll give them a few more weeks to make their appearance. Every year there are some baby pine trees coming up that I pull out.  They are coming up everywhere and I know that this planter is NOT a good place for them to start. A few years ago the birds planted a wild rose.  I chose not to pull it up.  Every year it grows bigger.  Due to the soil conditi...